In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628), author of this somber performance, was a minister to Elizabeth and James I and friend to and biographer of Sir Philip Sidney. His elegy on Sidney’s death is well worth reading. (This text is inferior but it’s the only link I can find. The poem ends “Salute the stones, that keep the limbs, that held so good a mind” — “keep the bones” jingles.) Greville died one of the richest men in England, stabbed by a servant who believed, mistakenly, that he was to be cheated of a bequest. He was also one of the greatest poets of one of the greatest eras in English poetry.

I have expostulated on tenor and vehicle in poetry, but this sonnet makes me doubt that the distinction is as simple as I made it out. It operates at three levels at least. At the literal level, night is simply night and the eye the eye. By “witty tyranny” Greville means tyranny of the wit, or the imagination. Anyone who has been startled by a shadow on a deserted street at night will understand “forge and raise impossibility.” The precision of those two verbs characterizes all of Greville’s verse.

The first quatrain contains a miniature treatise on epistemology. True perception, for Greville, requires both an external reality to perceive and an observer to do the perceiving. At night “distinction” (external reality) only appears to be lost; it has “gone down with the light” but remains, though hidden. Similarly the eye’s powers are unabated, but with “distinction” hidden they are useless, in fact worse than useless, for the perceiver turns them inward, projecting his own doubts, fears, and errors on a world he can no longer see.

Greville here begins to write at a second level, somewhere between tenor and vehicle. He has in mind much more than mere sight. Everyone, especially writers, who spend so much time cloistered with their own thoughts, knows how easy it is to promote a fancy to a theory, a preference to a dictum. (Of course I’m talking about the rest of you. I never do that.) Greville speaks of “proper reflections of the error” and in another poem of “the error’s ugly infinite impression,” the way it mirrors or ripples outward indefinitely. In his introduction to Greville’s poems, Thom Gunn remarks acutely that “the vowel-alliteration [of ‘ugly infinite impression’] makes it easy to say quickly; the error’s ‘impression’ spreads, similarly, with the ease and speed of a stain on water.”

Finally, as we ascend to the tenor, the poem is theological. The “evils” and “devils” of the closing couplet belong to Christian vocabulary, along with, less obviously, “depriving” and “error.” Gunn identifies night, at this level, with Hell. More precisely, it is man’s state deprived of divine Grace — “thick depriving darknesses.” Here reality is God. Life on earth is vanity, “self-confusednesses,” “self-offense,” and error, from which there is no escape but Grace. Whether the reader objects to the sentiment is beside the point. Greville knows perfectly well that the human mind can “distinguish” on its own, in some circumstances, and says so, in the same poem, and in the same words. The poem shows a great mind wrestling with an impossible intellectual situation.

To a modern sensibility Greville has no obvious appeal. The verse movement in Campion and Morley is sprightly: in Greville it is stately, even ponderous. Ralegh despairs cynically: Greville hopes, but realistically. Donne imposes and dramatizes his personality: Greville submerges his. Spenser rhapsodizes: Greville analyzes. Sidney was a dashing soldier who died young on the battlefield: Greville rendered greater service to the state by surviving to old age. His poetry was obscure in his own time, and its qualities guarantee its continued obscurity. He is only the subtlest, most precise intellect of all the Elizabethan poets. Intellect was not popular then, and it is less popular now.

(Update:Here is a portrait of Greville in which he looks very like what he was.)

This could be boiled down to: The poetry of the famous Elizabethan poets has attitude, Greville’s doesn’t. Very true–and thet explains why they are famous and he isn’t. And I think that’s proper because I agree with Kenneth Burke that the essense of poetry is symbolic attitude–not as Winters would have it, moral judgement.

John: Not having cracked Burke for ten years I am unequipped to discuss "symbolic attitude," although as I recall "symbolic action" was a more important term in his vocabulary. But generally speaking, all poets, including Greville, necessarily evince an attitude toward their subject matter. The question is whether we prefer attitude or attitudinizing.

Mike: My favorite poem in English has no perfect rhymes in it, and this contributes largely to its beauty. Rhyme and meter are means to an end; roughness, and imperfect rhymes, are to be judged only with reference to what the poet is trying to achieve. The smoothness of Daniel or Waller would be utterly unsuitable here. The 18th century made a fetish of this kind of "correctness," which I have discussed with regard to Pope. That said, the line you chose is perfecly regular pentameter, with no inversions. The fourth and second feet seem like trochees because the unaccented syllable is longer than the accented one in both cases. It’s a common mistake.

Yes, Burke’s key term is "symbolic action." But he also often characterizes a poem as an "attitude." It depends on whether he is considering it (to put the matter in terms he did not use) diachronically or synchronically–i.e. from the point of view of the experience of reading the poem or of having read it. Of course, he considers poetry from many other points of view than this. Action and attitude are the two modalities of only one (albeit the most important one) of his famous pentad–the constituents of which I frankly have forgotten, although I remember they are based on the 5 causes of scholastic philosophy, the names of some of which I have also forgotten. (So much for education.)

Be that as it may, sure, "attitudinizing" is a bad thing, and I suppose any poem has to have some quotient of authentic enlivening "attitude." But I find precious little in Greville. I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise, but his diction strikes me as tone deaf. I’m not sure how his poem is any more compelling or engaging than a prose statement of his meaning would be. In fact, I don’t see what is attractive about the poem as a poem beyond the completely separate (and comparatively trivial) appeal of the cleverness displayed in fitting his admittedly sharply reasoned sense into verse.

I think the problem is that many modern readers are used to poetry which has nothing but “attitudinal symbolism” or just plain “attitude.” Donne is one seventeenth-century poet whose self-proclamation works because he has an interesting “self,” which of course is likely a persona. Much modern poetry doesn’t work because the person(a) behind it is actually not very interesting and/or does not have the skill to create an interesting persona. Greville’s “impersonality” obviously poses a problem for modern readers precisely because his poetry is reflective rather than self-reflective, because it makes generalised statements and expresses philosophical views which are wider-ranging than those of self-referential contemporary poets. His poetry makes the reader think about the issues he raises rather than simply wondering what Greville himself thinks about himself. Just ramblings, but I am teaching Greville right now and people are responding on an intellectual level to his poems.